The present invention relates to embedding and extracting data blocks in a host data file or document.
Many data formats, such as Adobe Photoshop®, can contain different blocks of data. These data blocks represent contents, such as images or text, support information, such as pointers and tables, and metadata, such as image dimensions and captions. In order for applications other than the generator of the file to understand these data blocks, the format of the data file must be documented and published, and/or a toolkit or library must be provided. If the data format is complicated, the documentation or toolkit is correspondingly complicated, which can make it difficult for another application to read, understand, and write the data format. In many cases, a file format represents a container for other data. The intent of such a format is to allow other applications to store data blocks inside of this container. However, if the container format is complicated, use by other applications is inhibited.